The head of the Roman Catholic church in England was yesterday accused of betraying the religious character of a hospital by allowing its rules on abortion to be watered down. Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor authorised the code of ethics for the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth - which has a maternity unit in demand among celebrity mothers such as Kate Moss, Cate Blanchett and Emma Thompson.
It conspicuously fails to ban GPs working from the Catholic North London facility from either referring women for abortions or prescribing contraception and the morning-after pill.
The code was supposed to settle a three-year row which began with complaints that doctors were ignoring Catholic teaching on the sacredness of human life, and one had also performed woman-to-man gender reassignments.
The code sets out a range of practices forbidden at the private hospital, including euthanasia, sex-change operations, IVF, pre-natal testing such as amniocentesis, sterilisations, the fitting of contraceptive devices, and 'direct' abortion.
But a ban on abortion referrals, though included in an earlier code, was omitted because it would have brought GPs into conflict with their NHS contracts and would have been unworkable.
Helen Watt, director of the Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics, a Catholic bioethical institute, yesterday described the omission as 'very worrying'. She said Catholic teaching was ' absolutely opposed to prescriptions or referrals' for abortion or contraceptive purposes.
'A woman who is facing a difficult pregnancy should be offered not abortion, but positive support with having her baby.
'If it is wrong to perform a procedure oneself, it is also wrong to refer for that procedure. A Catholic hospital must make this unambiguously clear to everyone working on the premises.'
Nicholas Bellord, of Restituta, a group campaigning to retain the hospital's identity, said allowing abortion referrals 'would be a fundamental betrayal of its Catholic character'. He added: 'It is particularly scandalous if the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster himself has given his approval to such a code.'
However, a spokesman for the Cardinal, the patron of the hospital, said it was not his understanding that the code allowed abortion referrals.
He said the hospital board would 'not encourage' any practice that went against the teaching of the Catholic Church.
The Cardinal, he added, welcomed the new code and 'hopes the hospital will now move forward in its important healthcare mission, based on the teachings of the Catholic church'.
The spokesman cited a letter sent by Lord Guthrie, the hospital chairman and former head of Britain's Armed Services, to staff at the weekend saying that the hospital could not condone nor permit practices which 'conflict with Catholic teaching on the sanctity of life or respect for the human person'.
Lord Guthrie said that any ' questions of uncertainty' about this teaching should be submitted to the hospital's ethics committee.
'Ultimately, according to the statutes of the hospital, the final and conclusive arbiter of unresolved differences within the board is the Archbishop of Westminster,' Lord Guthrie said.
The code of ethics was finalised seven months after Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, who as Archbishop of Westminster is head of the Catholic church in both England and Wales, fired almost the entire board of directors at the hospital founded by the Sisters of Mercy in the 19th century.
The previous board had produced a code which explicitly forbade abortion referrals but it led to a rebellion by a large number of doctors, many of whom are not Catholic.
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